THERE’S NO IQ TEST FOR BEING A POLITICIAN: Sign Referencing Civil War Hero Is Sexual Harassment, Says Massachusetts Lawmaker: Rep. Michelle DuBois wants to remove a statehouse sign that reads “General Hooker Entrance” because it is an affront to “women’s dignity.”

But if there were such a test in Massachusetts, it would feature an IQ ceiling, not a floor. . . .

Plus: “Of course, DuBois is positioning herself as a crusader against sex-based harassment and patriarchy. But attitudes like hers—which treat women as excessively fragile beings, and which posit that female ‘dignity’ is diminished by even so slight an association with sex work as walking under a door that says ‘hooker’—just props up old-fashioned and patriarchal ideas about sex and gender.”

It would be easy to write an argument for restoring the patriarchy based solely on feminists’ statements about how weak, fragile, and stupid women are.

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THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT OF TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY IS REVEALING OUR “MOVERS AND SHAKERS” AS VENAL INCOMPETENT CROOKS:

And mostly, it’s just by causing them to reveal themselves as such.

OPEN THREAD: Comment like there’s no tomorrow.

YEAH, THAT’S BULLSHIT: “I remember walking across campus with my girlfriend one morning to find, nailed to trees, signs that declared, ‘All sex is rape.’ Perhaps the sentiment was not meant to be taken literally, but it still seemed to suggest that maleness was a kind of original sin that could never be fully expunged.”

Male privilege: “90 percent of ‘bystander rescues,’ in which a person tries to save a stranger, are performed by men. One in five rescuers dies in the attempt.” Sebastian Junger, however, is too apologetic about masculinity.

MASCOTS OF THE ANOINTED: The Left is Using Your Children, Sarah Hoyt writes.

ARTHUR MILLER’S DAUGHTER HUMANIZES PLAYWRIGHT IN NEW DOCUMENTARY: Some controversial behavior connected to the Communist Party gets played down.

Much worse is her fractured retelling of the events surrounding Miller’s confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its investigation of Hollywood’s Communist Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Director Elia Kazan, Miller’s best friend and stage collaborator, was an embittered ex-Communist who agreed to testify and name names of other party members. (“I hate the Communists and have for many years, and don’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” Kazan said.) Miller didn’t speak to him for 10 years, and also wrote a play, The Crucible, comparing HUAC and its witnesses as murderous witchhunters.

Eventually, Miller, too, got a subpoena. He denied ever being a Communist, even when HUAC confronted him with his written application for party membership. The manifest absurdity of his denial would be reinforced decades later when historians discovered Miller had been a secret writer for the Stalinist party cultural organ New Masses.

Nothing in Writer hints at Miller’s underground life, his false testimony to HUAC, or his secret allegiance to the most murderous dictator of the 20th century. Even making allowances for a daughter’s desire to put her father in the best possible light, that’s a little much.

As Mark Steyn wrote of screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo in 2003, when the off-Broadway play that was a likely inspiration for the 2015 biopic starring Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston as one of Miller’s Communist contemporaries, “Though the play won’t tell you the answer to that famous question – ‘Are you now or have you ever…?’ – the answer is: yes, he was. The more interesting question is: How do you feel about getting one of the great moral questions of the century wrong?”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

Not everyone in Hollywood is happy with the effect that the “Me Too” movement has had on their industry.

Director Terry Gilliam is one of the few men in Hollywood brave enough to speak out against the movement. Make no mistake, he knows Harvey Weinstein “is a monster,” but he believes some of the women who chose to work with him knew what they were getting into. And the mob that’s taken a hold of Hollywood in the wake of their allegations is out of control.

“It’s like when mob rule takes over, the mob is out there they are carrying their torches and they are going to burn down Frankenstein’s castle,” Gilliam told AFP.

—“Director Bashes The Me Too ‘Mob’ That’s Taken Control Of Hollywood,” the Daily Caller, yesterday.

● Chaser:

But it’s what you do while you’re here, and what you should be doing is living hopefully and trying to balance your needs and the needs of the world and the planet, and don’t fuck the place up.  So that’s the problem with the idea that it’s all going to go to rat shit eventually so let’s make as much money as possible.  Those people will always be a fungus and if I was running the country I would take them out and shoot them frankly, but that’s something else [laughs].

—Gilliam discussing the environment with a Website called Collider.com, while promoting his 2014 movie, The Zero Theorem, as quoted in “Terry Gilliam’s Eliminationist Rhetoric,” Ed Driscoll.com, September 24, 2014.

As I wrote at the time, “Gilliam’s dystopian 1985 film Brazil ends with Jonathan Pryce’s protagonist being brutally tortured by Michael Palin’s Speer or Eichmann-esque coolly technocratic statist character. Presumably, Pryce’s character dies at the end of the film or shortly afterwards. Who knew until now Gilliam meant it to be a happy ending and the whole film a how-to guide for big government?”

ANNALS OF MORAL POSTURING: You Can’t Spell Hypocrite without REI. “In 2017 alone Vista Outdoors’ brands generated $87 million for the Federal Aid and Wildlife Restoration Act—more money in a single year than REI donated in 42 years. Hunters and target shooters are paying a premium on products in support of the outdoors. REI is profiting from shooting sports’ investment, then pointing a scolding finger with the hand opposite the one clutching cash.”

TASTELESS IDEA OF THE YEAR: Headline writers of America, please go with this: “From Twitter to the Sh*tter.” I mean this story changes so much, I expect the next rumor is that they fired him during a sex change operation.

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MICHAEL WALSH: Mike Pompeo Might Be The Only Guy Trump Trusts.

FACEBOOK SUSPENDS TRUMP DATA FIRM FOR HARVESTING PRIVATE INFORMATION OF USERS. “We’ve been promised by Google, Facebook, and other social sites that our personal information is protected and that when some of our information is provided to third parties, our identity will never be made known. But now we have an example of just how disingenuous those promises are.”

IT’S JUST AN AURA OF A PENUMBRA OF A PERCEPTION. POLL: Perception of liberal bias hurting support for higher ed.

Speaking of which, “California teacher put on leave for asking if schools would allow walkouts to protest abortion.”

KARL MARX’S JEW-HATING CONSPIRACY THEORY: Marx didn’t supplant old ideas about money and commerce; he intensified them.

When God became sidelined as the source of ultimate meaning, “the people” became both the new deity and the new messianic force of the new order. In other words, instead of worshipping some unseen force residing in Heaven, people started worshipping themselves. This is what gave nationalism its spiritual power, as the volksgeist, people’s spirit, replaced the Holy Spirit. The tribal instinct to belong to a sacralized group took over. In this light, we can see how romantic nationalism and “globalist” Marxism are closely related. They are both “re-enchantment creeds,” as the philosopher-historian Ernest Gellner put it. They fill up the holes in our souls and give us a sense of belonging and meaning.

For Marx, the inevitable victory of Communism would arrive when the people, collectively, seized their rightful place on the Throne of History. The cult of unity found a new home in countless ideologies, each of which determined, in accord with their own dogma, to, in Voegelin’s words, “build the corpus mysticum of the collectivity and bind the members to form the oneness of the body.” Or, to borrow a phrase from Barack Obama, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Read the whole thing.

DERP STATE: Former UN Ambassador Samantha Power tells Trump it’s a bad idea to piss off John Brennan.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): My take:

Also, a flashback: CIA director John Brennan lied to you and to the Senate. Fire him.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Vitamin D helps body get benefits of calcium.

IF YOU NEED A FRIEND IN WASHINGTON, GET A DOG: John Kelly Learns a Hard Lesson About the Reality of the White House Press Corps.

AYN RAND DIDN’T WRITE THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: San Francisco Is Suffering From The Excesses Of Its Own Liberalism.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE ZOMBIE MEDIA APOCALYPSE: DA raids offices of university with financial ties to Newsweek.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 4 Go-To Setups for Any Defensive AR-15.

“MORAL CONFUSION IS THE POOR MAN’S COMPLEXITY.” So it’s not just me?! “‘Seven Days in Entebbe’ and the nostalgia for 1970s terrorism.”

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Too Late, Germany Realizes Its Mistake.

AMAZON DELETES REVIEWS OF CONSERVATIVE AUTHORS WITH NO EXPLANATION.

Earlier: The Censorship of Conservatives on the Internet Is Approaching Critical Levels of Bad.